Senior Fellow William F. Shughart discusses financial developments at General Motors and Chrysler, the real issues at stake in the TARP debate, and how Obamas bailouts are negatively affecting the limping economy.

From fingerprinting to criminal sentencing, from lawyer licensing to judicial selection, and from eminent domain to wealth transfers via class-action lawsuits, how do perverse incentives impact the law and what reforms would create a more just and efficient legal system?

Independent Institute Research Fellow Edward Lopéz, Associate Professor of Law and Economics at San Jose State University and editor of the new Institute book The Pursuit of Justice, talks with Institute President David Theroux about the faulty incentives at the heart of government legal failures and whether market-based alternatives can provide viable solutions to the serious problems caused by the bureaucratization and politicization of the law.

MyGovCost.org Director and Independent Research Fellow Emily Skarbek was a guest on the Heartland Institutes Budget & Tax News podcast. Click to listen to her commentary on the roots of our current spending crisis, whats at stake in the Congressional budget war, and how to use the Institutes very timely and user-friendly Government Cost Calculator.

Economics and environmentalism are types of modern religions. So says Robert H. Nelson in his analysis of the roots of economics and environmentalism and their mutually antagonistic relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The present debate raging over global warming exemplifies the clash of these two public theologies.